IT administrators can guarantee one thing after Christmas. Employees will be coming back from their Christmas breaks talking about their holidays, showing off photos of their kids and Santa….and showing off their new toys: Android phones, iPhone 5s, iPads, Galaxy tabs, Kindles and even some Windows Phone here and there.

Apparently device activations went up 332% on Christmas day. Apps download hit 20 million apps per HOUR. That’s a big wow for everyone, because it shows that Santa is a tech geek, and a LOT of people are getting tech gadgets for their presents. I mean, they just don’t wrap a book anymore do they?

As an aside, I wonder why on earth didn’t Blackberry cash in on the Christmas spirit?

Back to our faithful IT admins, the new devices brings in an old headache. How will we control these new, shiny timebombs in the hands of executives, who, through simple carelessness or plain ignorance could send data and information into public domain hell…data that the company has spent millions trying to protect?

We believe in 2013, MDM (mobile device management) will take a firmer hold in the collective consciousness of IT managers. These devices, in essence has taken over the netbooks and ultrabooks out there and should be treated as a device itself in an enterprise. Voice is no longer the primary function of these phones, as users spend less time talking and more time texting, facebooking, googling, youtubing, twittering and all sorts of new verbs invented to describe the new generation of communicating.

While we’re not a system integrator in a strict sense of the word, we do have obligations to get up to speed with new technologies and where we predict that the industry would be heading. We’ve got a few MDMs solutions being tested in our lab, as well as to see how they impact organisations. We don’t need it, yet. Our clients might. We tend to try to bust past the brochure knowledge of products and try them out in behalf of our clients even when there’s no demand yet…in that way, when we talk about technology, we talk about things we’ve experienced, not read about.

We’ll keep up the MDM subject as we enter 2013, and update on the progress on some of the solutions being tested.